Effective permittivity of snow for radar detection: Numerical validation by the fem method

This paper presents a step-by-step procedure to extract the effective permittivity of dry and wet snow in an electromagnetic simulator. The S-parameters are extracted using HFSS (High Frequency Structure Simulator), which is a Finite Element Method (FEM) full wave simulator. The permittivity curve is calculated using the S
₂₁
retrieval method. The calculated permittivity is compared with theoretical mixture models (Maxwell Garnett and Bruggeman Symmetric) with a verification that it lies between the effective permittivity theoretical bounds.